The Gaint in Graphics Industry

INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is a motion picture visual effects company, founded in May 1975 by George Lucas and owned by Lucasfilm. The company is highly popular for its continuous years of success in all-time legendary movies like Star Wars, Extra Terrestrial and Back to the Future. Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) has been providing post-production visual effects services to the entertainment industry. Motion pictures, commercials, trailers, music videos and special venue projects have utilized ILM's unequaled artistry in techniques such as model making, matte painting, computer-generated imagery, digital animation and a variety of related processes required in the production of visual effects. Ever since George Lucas created the company in 1975 to provide visual effects for the first Star Wars movie, ILM has been synonymous with movie magic and has given a new phase in the world of visual effects quoting "You can't spell film without ILM"

Established by George Lucas, Industrial Light and Magic has played a pioneering role in the creation of visual effects for various films. And while they continue to develop and utilize the full range of the techniques, in the field of digital effects ILM stands as emblematic as a technological thrill for the contemporary blockbuster. ILM is the leading effects facility in the world serving the motion picture, commercial production and attraction industries. It is at the front of visual effects technology and creativity and is marvelously consistent at producing dazzling results.

FORMATION: -

It all started when head of LucasArts, George Lucas wanted to work on a space opera known as Star Wars Episode IV- A New Hope. When he took his ideas and script to 20th Century FOX they liked the story. So FOX brought them in and FOX agreed on releasing the movie for George. But there was a problem with the effects; the Special effects department of FOX had been shut down because of costs and people's interest in more realistic looking films. He first approached Douglas Trumbull, famous for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull declined, but suggested his assistant John Dykstra. Dykstra brought together a small team of college students, artists and engineers who became the Special Visual Effects department on Star Wars. Alongside Dykstra other leading members of the original ILM team were Dennis Muren, Ken Ralston, Richard Edlund, Joe Johnston, Phil Tippett, and Steve Gawley. When making Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas reformed most of the team into Industrial Light & Magic in Marin County, California. They have since gone on to produce special effects for over two hundred films, including the Indiana Jones films, the Harry Potter films, the Jurassic Park films, the Back to the Future films, many of the Star Trek films, the 2007 live-action Transformers film and Ghostbusters II.

While much of ILM's early work was done with miniature models and motion controlled cameras, ILM has long been on the bleeding edge of computer generated visual effects. Its computer graphics division dates back to 1979, and its first CG production was the 1982 Genesis sequence from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

In the early days, ILM was involved with the creation of custom computer graphics hardware and software for scanning, modeling, rendering, and compositing (the process of joining rendered and scanned images together). Some of these systems made significant advances in areas such as morphing and simulating muscles and hair.

Naturally, as time went by many of the early innovations at ILM made it into the commercial realm, but the company's position on the cutting edge of visual effects technology continues to rely on an ever-changing combination of custom in-house technologies and commercial products.

Today, ILM runs a batch processing environment capable of modeling, rendering and compositing tens of thousands of motion picture frames per day. Thousands of machines running Linux, IRIX, Compaq Tru64, OS X, Solaris, and Windows join together to provide a production pipeline that is used by approximately eight hundred users daily, many of whom write or modify code that controls every step of the production process. In this context, hundreds of commercial and in-house software components are combined to create and process each frame of computer-generated or enhanced film.

ILM established their use of Computer-generated imagery when they hired Edwin Catmull from NYIT in 1979. John Lasseter worked for ILM in the early 1980s as a computer animator. The computer graphics department, now known as Pixar, was eventually sold to Steve Jobs, which went on to create the first CG animated feature with Toy Story. As of 2006, ILM has received 16 Best Visual Effects Oscars and 20 additional nominations. It had also received 22 technical Oscars.

THE CREW: -

For a company like ILM it is easy to create computer-generated (CG) effects for any film. But actually, it is an intense process that requires tremendous amounts of research and lots of painstaking labor. ILM has a staff of more than 1,000 skilled employees, including:

• Visual effects supervisors
• Technical directors
• Software developers
• Scientists
• Art directors
• Producers
• Model makers
• Animators
• Editors
• Camera operators
• Stage technicians

SOFTWARES USED IN ILM: -

Like many other visual effects companies, ILM currently uses a combination of commercial softwares and proprietary softwares developed by them. Initially when ILM was developed, commercial softwares for animation did not exist so it had to mainly rely on its inhouse applications. With the introduction of Maya, ILM used it mainly for modeling purposes. Later it began to use software known as Softimage.

Nowadays ILM’s workflow is mainly based on its proprietary application known as Zeno .It was developed in 1998 and was used in Star Wars Episode I- The Phantom Menace. Later its full capacity was used in War of the Worlds (2005). Zeno is used as a basic application for LucasArts in its Video gaming territory as a game editor Zeno is greatly integrated with Maya. For example, the Digital artists can setup and animate a character inside Maya, take it into Zeno to apply dynamics, and export it back into Maya. Python is used as a main scripting language since 1996.

ILM used software called as Caricature mainly for animation. It was used for the secondary facial animation for Dragonheart. But later, then Zeno carried over the work of Caricature. ILM developed other proprietary softwares called ViewPaint for painting 3D models, ISculpt for modeling and Lux for lighting.

For compositing ILM concentrates on using 3 applications mainly- Apple Shake, Sabre and Adobe after Effects. For Rendering, it uses Photorealistic RenderMan and Mental Ray. PRMan was developed by Pixar Animation studios. PRMan was originally developed by the Lucasfilm CG Group. But Lucas sold the computer division specializing in Rendering to Steve Jobs. When the group was reformed as Pixar in 1986, part of the agreement with Steve Jobs was that ILM would get early access to any technology developed by Pixar. Since then PRMan has become the rendering workhorse at ILM. ILM started using ZBrush for displacement maps for Pirates of the Caribbean. Industrial Light and Magic’s proprietary softwares are developed by Stanford’s computer graphics group mainly for creating smoke, fire and fluid simulations seen in Terminator series and Poseidon.

PROJECTS: -

ILM has worked over 300 movies and has brought about a great evolution in the movie making industry. It has also worked on dozens of commercials, music videos and video games. Some of the greatest works of ILM can be seen in the following movies.

Ø Star Wars Saga

Ø Indiana Jones Series

Ø E.T -The Extra Terrestrial

Ø Abyss

Ø Willow

Ø Jurassic Park Series

Ø Jumanji

Ø Terminator

Ø Forrest Gump

Ø Saving Private Ryan

Ø The Mummy

Ø Harry Potter Series

Ø The Chronicles of Narnia- The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

Ø Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy

Ø Transformer